Cloud computing involves the use of hardware and software resources to provide services over a network. In most cloud computing models, the responsibility of providing and maintaining the hardware and software infrastructure falls on the cloud service provider. By shifting these responsibilities to the cloud service provider, organizations and other consumers may quickly access and switch between cloud services without incurring the upfront costs of acquiring the supporting infrastructure. Another benefit of cloud computing is that resources may be shared by multiple tenants, which improves scalability and reduces the costs of the underlying infrastructure.
In order to minimize the costs of providing cloud services, cloud administrators are often tasked with managing a relatively large number of cloud service accounts. For example, the cloud administrator may be responsible for ensuring that hardware and software resources contributing to hundreds or even thousands of cloud service accounts are up-to-date and operating properly. If issues within the cloud computing environment are not efficiently detected and addressed, then problems may begin to compound at an accelerated rate. In the worst case scenario, the accumulated problems may result in service disruptions, which are unacceptable to many consumers such as organizations relying on the cloud service to provide other services to paying customers. In addition, if enough problems accumulate, then cloud administrators may not have enough bandwidth to resolve consumer complaints in a reasonable timeframe.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.